It's ALmOsT OvER!!! Here are Your Finalists Of the Biggest It Happened To Me Contest of All TIme

Well, it was the only IHTM contest of all time. IHTM was something I dreamed up when I was a little girl (24) making the plans for this magazine that got called Sassy. IHTM was one of my favorite columns ever (maybe my favorite, but I liked Prank and Makeunder and Blind Date and Cute Band Alert and the title of Zits and Stuff too), so I carried it over to Jane magazine and then here to xoJane and xoVain.

And then I was talking about wanting to run more IHTMs here, not having time to edit that many, me wanting to run them unedited (I'm always a fan of seeing unedited work, which could be just my own little weird thing) and let you guys pick the winner and give the winner a bunch of money. To get more of you published here and to reward someone and who doesn't love a contest?

The idea of getting free content wasn't even part of the conversation, but you guys rightfully pointed out that once we got so many submissions, the amount we were paying diminished to less per post than we would have paid if we had commissioned them all. So, I'm sorry about that. And from now on, we are going to pay $50 for every It Happened To Me that we run.

And that brings us to today, 256 entries later, having published a range of your stories over the last month-plus. I can't thank you enough for everything you put into them. Thank you so so much.

Now it's time to pick a winner. So if you care, help out by checking or re-checking out these finalists and telling me which one you think should be the big-money winner. Do your up-voting thing and whatever else you want to do here to make it really clear who you think should win.